NONCONSUMER ADVOCATE

WINSTED, CONN.
— Ralph Nader has been frozen into journalistic parlance as a ``consumer advocate.'' Yet the man is about as close to a nonconsumer as an American can be. He owns no house, no car, and writes on a manual typewriter in an office that contains little else besides paper.

Reporters have treated this indifference to possessions as an oddity, even a symptom of psychological disorder. To Nader, it is a question of freedom to do the work he cares about.

``When you have a lot of things,'' he mused during a recent interview, ``you have to spend an inordinate amount of time taking care of them. Paying bills, repairing them, taking them back, replacing them. And that is the entire point.